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Dentist, tuckshop cited on web blacklist

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The Queensland dentist included on the Australian communications
regulator's blacklist of prohibited websites has demanded that the
list be cleaned up, as he is now being associated with child porn
peddlers and sexual violence sites.

Websites contained on it will be blocked for all Australians
once the government implements its mandatory internet filtering
scheme - originally pitched as targeting only "illegal" content -
later this year.

But, as experts have long warned the government, having a
top-secret blacklist of banned sites is dangerous because there is
a real danger that Australian businesses could be added to the list
in error, with little recourse.

Inevitable leaks of the list, as happened today, mean those
innocent businesses' websites could be associated with child porn
repositories.

"Any person or corporation that would be identifiable on the
list would potentially be deemed by the general public ... either a
child molester or at least in the same category as child
molesters," said University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn
Landfeldt.

"In effect, this could be interpreted by some as a government
sanctioned hate list.

"Even if the list is not leaked directly, it may be possible to
reverse engineer the list and find out its content."

Other Australian sites on the list are canteens.com.au
("Tuckshop and Canteen Management Consultants") and animal carers
MaroochyBoardingKennels.com.au.

The dentist, Dr John Golbrani, was furious when contacted to
inform him that his site, dentaldistinction.com.au, appeared on the
blacklist.

"A Russian company broke into our website a couple of years back
and they were putting pornographic listings on there ... [but] we
changed across to a different web provider and we haven't had that
problem since," Golbrani said in a phone interview.

He said the fact that he hadn't been removed from the list was
"criminal" and he was scared potential customers may avoid him.

"The government needs to get in and clean it up," said
Golbrani.

Jocelyn Ashcroft, who runs a school canteen consultancy in
Queensland, also said she had no idea why her site had made it on
to the blacklist.

"The only thing I can think of is that I have emailed schools
telling them about my book and CD resource How to Have a
Healthy and Profitable Theme Day," she said

"This is targeted specifically at schools and I send each email
individually. There is no software involved in this process, just
me copy and pasting."

Daniel Purser, who runs a web hosting and web design company out
of NSW called Startcorp, was also shocked to learn that his site
had been blacklisted.

He said there was "no chance" any of his customers were hosting
child porn or other questionable content.

"We only host our own customers that we've done designs for and
most of them are referrals from our own customers or referrals from
my family," he said.

"Our service provider in Australia wouldn't tolerate it either,
they've got a very definite anti-pornography rule.

"Obviously somebody needs to have a look at the list and
actually make an assessment on whether it's a legitimate complaint
or not because obviously no investigation has been done at
all."

Colin Jacobs, spokesman for online users' lobby group Electronic
Frontiers Australia said: "The prospect of mandatory nation-wide
filtering of this secret list is pretty concerning from a
democratic point of view."

UPDATE: The Minister for Broadband,
Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, has
this afternoon denied that the list of banned websites published on
Wikileaks is the ACMA blacklist.

"The published list purports to be current at 6 August 2008 and
apparently contains approximately 2400 URLs whereas the ACMA
blacklist for the same date contained 1061 URLs," he said in a
statement.

"There are some common URLs to those on the ACMA blacklist.
However, ACMA advises that there are URLs on the published list
that have never been the subject of a complaint or ACMA
investigation, and have never been included on the ACMA
blacklist."

The list on Wikileaks is understood to have been obtained from
an internet filtering software maker.

The disparity in the reported figure is most likely due to the
fact that the list contains several duplicates and variations of
the same URL that stem from a single complaint. Alternatively, some
sites may have been added to the list by the filter software
maker.